fb pixel
The University of Winnipeg

Reaching Toward Queer Wild Strawberry Entanglements

Thu. Jun. 11, 2026

wild strawberry plant and exhibition information

Join The Wild Strawberry Collective for their exhibition, Reaching Toward Queer Wild Strawberry Entanglements, an exhibit of mixed-media works exploring our varied relationships with the wild strawberry plant. Our vegetal relationships –that is, relationships between humans and plant life that go beyond, or even reject, the transactional mode of relating with plants–  are rooted in our queerness and our connections with more-than-human kin and the land. Drawing from settler and Indigenous perspectives and various artistic practices, we explore queer entanglements and ideas from queer ecologies and Indigenous epistemologies. We ask: how might we hold relationships with plant kin as queer artists to develop relationality, wonder and respect? The wild strawberry brings connection, sweetness, care, and medicine. Across Winnipeg and across Turtle Island, the imagination nourished by the wild strawberry plant connects us. We are brought together by wild strawberries.

Group Exhibition at Matter Queer Space Manitoba Inc. (433 Graham Avenue, lower level) in collaboration with the UW greenhouse artlab. 

Visit the greenhouse artlab on Instagram for more info and gallery hours! 

The works shown in Reaching Toward Queer Wild Strawberry Entanglements are rooted in the queer relationships we hold with the wild strawberries.  The idea of a human body is subverted (“Queer Anatomy”); we are taught to see in a queered way (“strawberry lenses”); we learn to love a plant-kin monstrosity (‘Strawberry Monstrosity’);  and we practice radical openness to enchantment (‘Wild Strawberries’). The wild strawberries are threaded both literally (‘Pawatamihk dii frayz’) and metaphorically, their runners strewing through each work as we are reminded to think and feel as a collective, together and in autonomous artistic and land-based zones.

We come from a variety of perspectives, histories and focuses. We thought it important to include that here, showing how we converge and diverge with the wild strawberries in mind. Through art-making and connection with one another and the wild strawberry we explore who we are when we ask questions of our wild strawberry kin, and also when the strawberry kin ask us questions. Key to our work is the act of listening, with open hearts and minds, and with a readiness to exist in the world as our changed selves. Like the wild strawberry plant who sends out stolons (runners), we hope that through engagement with these works runners might extend to you too, so you might find yourself entangled alongside us in this queer vegetal practice.

We are grateful to be exhibiting these works at Matter Queer Space Manitoba Inc. Matter Queer Space Manitoba Inc. (Matter) is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run, and donation-supported Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (2SQTBIPOC) -mandated art gallery, library, and queer community programming space. Matter centres 2SQTBIPOC art, literature, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people. For financial support of this project we thank the University of Winnipeg and the SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant, Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices.

The Wild Strawberry Collective:

The Wild Strawberry, Ode’imin, Ohtihimin, Lii Frayz berry producing beings who survive and flourish even though we live through harsh winters in the prairies. We provide some of the earliest nectar for bumble, leafcutter, mason, carpenter and cuckoo bees and embody generosity, reaching out and strewing, setting out runners to find ground to establish new plants. We are vigorous vegetal beings, blooming in early spring, fruiting in summer and bringing sweetness and connection to those who look below their feet to discover us and the gifts we bring.

Roewan Crowe was born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta. Crowe left the prairies and travelled to Toronto to deepen engagements with art and feminism before settling down in Manitoba.Through performance, installation, video, text, and theory, Crowe conjures intimate multispecies, multisensory worlds, creating space for transformation, connection, and quee rencounters.Their work engages with queer/trans/feminist ecologies,embodiment, site-specificity, collaboration and collectivity. They are a queer white settler with Irish, English and Volga German ancestry. The wild strawberry plant has led them to learn more deeply about wild strewing and vegetal imagination. 

Lily Gautron is a Red River Métis beadwork artist and student based in Winnipeg, MB. Their family has roots in Haywood and Pine Falls, Manitoba. Lily’s work is based in their relationships with Queer & Métis kin, as well as the plant and animal kin around them. Their relationship to the wild strawberries is intertwined with their 2-Spirituality, the runners of the strawberry connecting them to their community and their ancestors.

Anna Hunter is a queer white settler artist with English and Austrian roots from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their work focuses on wild desire, connection, and entanglement; being a part of this exhibit has deepened their connection with the wild strawberries, human and more-than-human kin in unexpected, but fully welcome, ways. Anna focuses on sound and vision, sensuality and the way they weave through time and space. They seek to understand their relationship to white settler identity through conscious connection and radical hope. The strawberries have shown a path of strewing and relationship-building that has guided Anna to new and exciting futures.

Max Noonan is an Urban and Inner City Studies major with an academic focus of community advocacy, with a specific interest in harm reduction, disability justice and the reclamation of space. They are of largely settler descent, although partially due to their Indigenous ancestors being forcefully assimilated into the white mennonite community. Max creates art, mainly through crochet, as praxis that challenges gender expression and the elitism of artistic practices. The wild strawberry has offered him the opportunity to explore various intersections between ecology, queer theory and kinship. His engagement signifies the resilience of branching out, or strewing between and among communities.

Salem Roby is a trans & queer forest ecologist and artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, with English, Irish, Scottish, and Lithuanian ancestry. His work, both scientific and artistic, centers on spiritual and physical connection to land and understanding the land as an archive of stories and relationships. Their involvement in the Wild Strawberry Collective has given them an opportunity to explore a relationship with the wild strawberry as a mentor and comrade, and the space to think deeply about more-than-human relationships on this land as a person of European descent. The strawberries have taught him that being a part of the web of creation/relation means being curious, brave, vulnerable, and reaching out into the great unknown.

The Wild Strawberry Collective is a queer research-creation collective seeded in the greenhouse artlab at the University of Winnipeg as part of the research-creation initiative, “Radical Flourishing In and Through Collapse: Queer, Multispecies, Artistic Entanglements.” Radical Flourishing confronts our rapidly changing social, political, and biospheric environments by cultivating imagination, artistic practice, collective experimentation, and interspecies research-creation in a repurposed abandoned greenhouse. Together, we’ve grown wild strawberries from seed; engaged in scholarly and creative research; learned from Cree, Anishinaabe, and Métis teachings and scholarship; created performance scores and artwork; held a community workshop; gifted wild strawberry plants; and engaged in relationship-building in the local arts community. We attended a Strawberry Moon ceremony, feasted with a Two-Spirit Kookum, and planted seedlings at meaningful sites: in Kookum’s front yard, at the edge of a small garden in the inner city, on the banks of the Assiniboine River, alongside a riparian zone in the suburbs, and in the liminal strip of a repurposed city boulevard.

 

We’re here. We’re queer. We’re entangled.

#sostrawberry #soentangled #soqueer #reachingout #sovegetal